ABSTRACT
As educational thinkers wrestle with the question of what’s next (after postmodernism), educational systems in most Western countries are still predominantly traditional-modernist in their basic orientation, exemplified, for example, by an ‘industrialized consumption’ of time, rigid curriculums, a clear hierarchy between teachers and pupils as well as a clear separation of disciplinary subjects. But even if those claiming that postmodernism is obsolete as an intellectual movement are correct, no ‘rightful’ heir has yet to emerge. As Peters (2008) fittingly observed: ‘Reading the signs of exhaustion—an end or completion—the users of this device, following many precedents, lacked the confidence to name ‘the new’ and fell back upon the strategy of naming what it is not. This process of negative definition is, intellectually, both less risky and less ambitious’. A prominent exception to Peters’s scolding is Bauman’s notion of ‘liquid modernity’, which he explicitly presents as a ‘positive’ corrective to ‘postmodern’:
…the concept of "postmodern" was but…a "career report" of a search − still on − going and remote from completion. That concept signalled that the social world had ceased to be like the one mapped using the "modernity" grid…"Postmodern" has done its preliminary, site − clearing job: it aroused vigilance and sent the exploration in the right direction. It could not do much more, and so it shortly outlived its usefulness… We have, so to speak, matured to afford (to risk?) a positive theory of the novelty (Bauman, 2002).
